The present invention relates to a complete vehicle wheel assembly comprising a specially designed wheel with wheel rim and a specially designed tire having beads. The present invention also relates to a method for manufacturing the afordescribed complete vehicle wheel assembly.
Tires are disposable articles because due to wear of the tire tread only a limited service life is provided.
Conventionally, the wheel and the tire are separate entities which can be bought individually.
For mounting a new tire on a wheel rim of a wheel, it is required to first demount the worn tire, position the new tire, fill it with air, balance the tire/wheel and to mount the tire/wheel assembly on the vehicle. These different steps are manually performed as individual services. Performing the afordescribed steps in an automated fashion or making the process more economical by reducing the number of steps is not possible. Furthermore, mounting the tire requires skilled labor, and also special tools. Balancing of the tire/wheel assembly requires a corresponding balancing machine and an operator having the necessary skills for operating such a balancing machine. Because of the aforementioned reasons, the mounting of new tires is expensive with respect to labor costs and, on the other hand, these working steps cannot be performed by a technically inexperienced driver in a do it yourself fashion.
Since wheels can be produced relatively inexpensively as a mass-produced article, and since it must be expected that the labor for the manual mounting and balancing of tires will increase steadily, it is to be expected, when taking into consideration mass production in countries having a low wage, that, when comparing manual mounting costs with the costs for a complete tire/wheel assembly, the break-even point has already been reached or will soon be surpassed.
Also, there is no contradiction, between a long service life tire and the inventively integrated tire/wheel assembly. Only with respect to expensive luxury cars, classic cars, and vehicles with expensive aluminum wheels, manual mounting of the tires will still be used in the future.
When the tires of a vehicle are worn, in the future the driver will purchase a complete tire/wheel assembly at a supermarket in order to subsequently mount the tire/wheel assembly himself on the vehicle in the same manner as a spare tire or special tires for winter driving conditions. This will become so common place in the future as is today self service refueling of the vehicle.
Different wheel tire arrangements are known from the prior art in which the beads of the tire are fastened in laterally arranged grooves at the outer circumference of the wheel.
From German Offenlegungsschrift 26 37 272 such an pneumatic tire/wheel assembly is known in which the pneumatic tire is secured at the wheel rim such that the beads arranged at the tire sidewalls engage corresponding bead seats at the wheel. The bead seats at the wheel rim are circumferentially extending grooves which have a narrow opening for receiving the ends of the tire flanks. The wheel rims are comprised of two parts that can be secured at one another by screws in order to form the upper and lower portion of the receiving opening. When assembled, the width of the opening is narrower than the bead thickness of the tire so that the bead is safely prevented from slipping out of the wheel rim.
From German Offenlegungsschrift 36 05 803 a vehicle wheel assembly comprising of wheel rim and a pneumatic vehicle tire is known whereby the tire beads are positioned in laterally arranged grooves at the wheel rim. Fastening of the tire at the wheel rim is performed by applying a clamping ring.
German Offenlegungsschrift documents 37 32 590, 37 33 515, and 38 09 425 describe an arrangement comprised of a pneumatic vehicle tire and a wheel in which the wheel rim also comprises lateral annular grooves for receiving the tire beads and in which fastening of the beads inserted into the grooves is realized by compressing the upper and lower portions defining the opening of the groove.
According to German Offenlegungsschrift 36 01 185 the two beads of a pneumatic vehicle tire are embedded in lateral annular grooves of the wheel rim. Here the openings are again more narrow than the widest cross-section of the bead. The tire beads are threaded into the narrow opening of the groove by rotation or by deformation. A special tire/wheel fastening is not provided.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an inexpensive complete wheel assembly comprised of a pneumatic vehicle tire and a wheel.